4 LATEX Primer

This section is a brief introduction to LATEX concepts and
syntax, to provide authors enough information to author documents
productively without having to become ``TEXnicians.''

Perhaps the most important concept to keep in mind while marking up
Python documentation is that while TEX is unstructured, LATEX was
designed as a layer on top of TEX which specifically supports
structured markup. The Python-specific markup is intended to extend
the structure provided by standard LATEX document classes to
support additional information specific to Python.

LATEX documents contain two parts: the preamble and the body.
The preamble is used to specify certain metadata about the document
itself, such as the title, the list of authors, the date, and the
class the document belongs to. Additional information used
to control index generation and the use of bibliographic databases
can also be placed in the preamble. For most authors, the preamble
can be most easily created by copying it from an existing document
and modifying a few key pieces of information.

The class of a document is used to place a document within a
broad category of documents and set some fundamental formatting
properties. For Python documentation, two classes are used: the
manual class and the howto class. These classes also
define the additional markup used to document Python concepts and
structures. Specific information about these classes is provided in
section 5, ``Document Classes,'' below. The first thing
in the preamble is the declaration of the document's class.

After the class declaration, a number of macros are used to
provide further information about the document and setup any
additional markup that is needed. No output is generated from the
preamble; it is an error to include free text in the preamble
because it would cause output.

The document body follows the preamble. This contains all the
printed components of the document marked up structurally. Generic
LATEX structures include hierarchical sections, numbered and
bulleted lists, and special structures for the document abstract and
indexes.